Of all the trends that impinge upon Viridiana’s day-to-day activities, this is the one that is treated as obvious by all her peers. The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the Federal government in the US has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal dollar expenditures for R&D have been more or less flat over the last 15 years. Science policy experts know this wasn’t only a matter of tight budgets, but that it involves a dramatic reversal of principles which had become ingrained in the political psyche in the years just after WWII. During the Cold War, it had become a matter of strategic necessity to maintain an advanced science base, for both military superiority and ideological reasons. For about three decades, the military was recruited to serve as science manager and to organize patronage (contrary to some impressions, the civilian National Science Foundation never bulked large in this period), but around the time of the Vietnam war many imperatives began to encourage the military to divest this function. One scenario might have been to shift the function wholesale to some other civilian arm of government, but outside of areas of biomedicine covered by the NIH, this by and large didn’t happen. By 1980, the proportion of R&D accounted for by industry surpassed that coming from the Federal government, and thus the problem of whom or what would take over the job of science manager in charge was starting to be settled by default. Far from being some idiosyncratic aspect of American history, much the same thing happened in other Western countries with large military sectors, although with somewhat of a lag.

The conscious unwinding of the military/academic complex wended through many way stations, but the one that has received the most attention of late has been the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The first wave of commentary portrayed the Act, which initially allowed universities and small businesses to own patents on discoveries made with government R&D funding, as freeing up a tsunami of commercial-grade science, which had been supposedly bottled up in ivory towers by earlier government regulations. This was followed by similar legislation in many other Western countries, chasing the dream of cornucopia locked up in their own universities. A second wave of commentary pointed out the real story wasn’t much like that at all, but nonetheless the lines of causality became even murkier, as arguments degenerated into disputes over whether the US universities had actually asked for the Bayh-Dole legislation, or whether the universities had already enjoyed the ability to patent government-funded research before Bayh-Dole, or indeed if the net result was just a plethora of lower-grade patents by universities that had never before sought them out. The Bayh-Dole Red Herring has drawn attention away from the fact that there had been a whole sequence of legislation in the US disengaging the government from previous Cold War science management, as a prelude to turning responsibility over to the corporate sector. No single piece of legislation could have done the trick, nor did it. Government revisions of policies with regard to intellectual property or educational subsidy may have constituted incentives, but could not unilaterally impose the structure of the new regime. Governments could give a one-time windfall to research performers in the form of IP they had not paid for, but that did not mean they intended to continue providing such massive implicit subsidies as a matter of course. Hence universities could not have seriously expected that Bayh-Dole was going to spell their ultimate deliverance from penury. While legislation such as the Bayh-Dole Act was enabling, it should not be confused with the cause of the privatization of science, which was instead attributable to the larger shift in the nexus of science management and funding.

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